132
PARTISAN REVIEW
•
• •
IT
WAS NOT DIFFICULT
to identify Milosevic and his regime with politi–
cal and moral evil. I also found the behavior of many "ordinary" Serbs
repugnant: their participation in ethnic cleansing was one of its precon–
ditions, since the removal and brutalization of more than a million peo–
ple requires a large number of willing ancl eager participants. The scenes
of Serbian crowds engulfed in self-righteous nationalistic frenzy on the
streets of Belgrade were also singularly unappealing ("people at rock
concert rallies in Belgrade and other cities, dancing in defiance of NATO
and in support of the man they call Slobo," as the
New York Times
described it). Images of aggressive self-assertion joined with maudlin
affirmations of collective victimhood. Mark Mazower of Princeton Uni–
versity observed that "hatred of Albanians is not something invented by
Milosevic; it has deep roots in Serbian political culture....Serb nation–
alism lisl resentful and narcissistic, claiming victimhood for itself and
indifferent to the sufferings of the real victims." Siavenka Draculic
argued (in a Hungarian publication in June) that from the Serbian point
of view Albanians have long been invisible:
If
they were noted at all it was only as some sort of an abstract
entity... rather than fellow citizens endowed with the same rights
.... ISerbsl seem incapable of identifying with the sufferings of peo–
ple they do not regard as being of equal stature... the sufferings of
their fellow citizens do not elicit any human emotion... the preju–
dices toward Albanians are comparable to those directed in other
cultures at Jews, blacks, or gypsies.
resonated to Daniel Goldhagen's analogy between Nazi-German,
World War II Japanese, and Serb behavior, although the scale and qual–
ity of the three sets of misdeeds were quite different. As Goldhagen
observed,
In
all three instances... the vicious treatment of the victims has
been supported by a large majority... that was beholden to an ide-
ology which called for the conquest of Lebensraum.... They
believed fanatically in the rightness of these actions.. . .In all three
instances the cri meso .. were ca rried ou t by ord ina ry members of
the societies...when their governments moved them
to
do so.
In
all
three instances the majority of the people whose country was com–
mitting these enormous crimes deluded themselves into believing
